After two months on Steemit I have eventually built up enough Steem Power from blog earnings to start earning minuscule curation rewards. Currently my weekly curation earnings equal one takeaway Wimpy mega coffee. Wimpy coffee (R26,90/$1,95), together with chicken curry roti rolls (R37/$2,68) are my life.
I actually require at least 3 Wimpy mega coffees to get through the week, more if it's cold! As for chicken curry roti rolls, I can eat them for breakfast, lunch and supper! This means a certain amount of curation strategy is needed to meet my dietary requirements!
I think most people with a Steem Power similar to mine, which is currently around 820, will be familiar with the 0,001 curation reward. I have noticed that this amount is the usual payout if you vote for a "big name", such as @dollarvigilante or @charlieshrem. I didn't think much about curation rewards before, as my main focus was blogging so I tended to vote for people who put a lot of work into their blog and it only received a few votes, as I knew how disheartening that felt.
All of a sudden I started to notice something interesting, my curation rewards rapidly increased in value. My highest curation reward was 0,70, which is impressive for my level of Steem Power. I would need seven hundred 0,001 payouts to equal that one reward. What I am basically trying to say is forget voting for the big names unless you are genuinely impressed with their article. I do realise if you vote for them at exactly the right time, your payout will be good, but that is merely a matter of luck. Vote for what you enjoy, though if I have to be brutally honest, because there is not enough interesting content yet for me to use my 40 votes on, I vote on "effort" expended, or just on what catches my eye. If only one vote receives a curation reward, say of 0,20, which is doable, it is still better than 40 X 0.001 rewards.
This strategy has had the added bonus of making my feed much more interesting, and I unfollowed all the "big names" who dealt in subject matter that didn't appeal to me. I also feel satisfaction in voting for someone who only has received a few votes, because as a blogger, and especially a new blogger at that, I know how it feels to work hard and feel devastatingly unrewarded. Additionally, if more votes were directed toward diverse content from a wide variety of authors, the experience of inequality on Steemit would be reduced.
Now to touch on a point of irritation. If you are a minnow, vote 100%, you are not doing yourself any favours by voting less than that. I have a couple of voters who consistently vote 1% on my blogs. Why??? What good does do them, or me? I do use my slider for comments, but even then I vote around 20%. To me a 1% vote has a kind of stingy connotation.
Lastly, although I know that this has been covered extensively before, it is worth repeating. Interact with the community through meaningful comments. As our community is still small, it will soon be noticed if you constantly post a variation of "great work, good blog" on hundreds of articles, in an effort to gain recognition and followers. It doesn't work, it's annoying. Meaningful comments have the added benefit of the possibility of you earning author rewards. The majority of my blogs earn under 1SBD, and often a single comment I make will surpass an entire blog's earnings. As an added bonus, you could also gain followers.
As for me, currently one cup of Wimpy Mega coffee a week is a guilt free indulgence, I have earned it in invested Steem Power. And that is not bad at all for simply clicking on a little ^ button. As for all those other cups of coffee, and the roti rolls, the guilt is REAL.
